Granny loves getting Christmas cards. She always adds them to her Christmas decor. For many years she hung them on a string like in the photo above. Other years she taped them to the entry way or the wall like in the photo from yesterday’s post.
This week when I was staying with her she had me go to the mailbox to put a bill in it and when I brought the mail back she was so excited to see a Christmas card.
She said “I know who it’s from.” I asked her how she could know without opening it. She said she knew it was from her nephew Eddie because his card was the first one to arrive every year.
Sure enough when she opened it up it was from cousin Eddie and his wife.
According to the Why Christmas website Sir Henry Cole started the tradition of sending Christmas Cards in 1843. Cole, who lived in the United Kingdom, was an employee of the new post office system. Cole wanted everyday people to be able to use the postal system just like the more well to do folks and government officials used it. Cole thought Christmas cards would be the perfect way for every day folks to use the postal system.
One of Cole’s friends, John Horsley, was an artist. Horsely designed the first Christmas Card and the two of them sold it for 1 shilling, which was quite a bit of money in those days.
By the 1870s cards and postage had dropped in price making it easier for more folks to send Christmas cards.
Granny doesn’t get as many cards as she used to because a lot of her family and friends have done gone on and not as many people today send Christmas cards.
If you’d like to send her a Christmas card I know it would tickle her to death! You can email me at blindpigandtheacorn@gmail.com for her address.
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Granny will be receiving the best card I can find. Such a special lady❤️
I’m like Granny, I display the Christmas cards my hubby and I receive each year on my wall, door frame or hang them around the mirror above our fireplace. I use to keep them every year until the next Christmas, but now after Christmas I recycle them. I’ve learned over the years, I can’t keep everything, but I can recycle as much as I can to free up clutter in my home.
I love Granny’s enthusiasms for Christmas and Christmas Cards!
We still receive many cards, so they must be popular up our way! I save all my cards from year to year. I cut the back off & turn them into post cards and send them back out to all of our friends. They are often too pretty to throw away. I have one friend that we keep gluing a piece of paper over the writing & making a new post card out of it! We think its funny & wonder how long we can do this without the postal service refusing to send it. When the girls were little we would cut the cards up & make new ones with construction paper to send to veterans or a nursing home. Do you know how impossible that has become???? No one is willing to take them! If they are willing to take them, they can’t have any religious text (which is the WHOLE POINT of Christmas). We made all these beautiful cards & called & called with no luck. We finally gave up on doing it, which bummed me out. I do love to get a card!
Congratulations on reaching 200,000 subscribers!! That is well deserved for you and all of your family. I enjoyed seeing everyone last night on the video. I agree with what someone else said, Granny stole the show!! She is precious and I loved her sweater and I also saw the pretty one Corie had on decorating her cute little pink tree. Congratulations once again!! Hmmm, maybe Granny needs her own u-tube channel. She’s priceless!!!
Granny’s card it in the mail….tell her hello for me please…
Tipper, congratulations on reaching the 200,00 mark it is well deserved and earned! 🙂 I still love sending and receiving cards, especially nowadays since a lot of people have gotten away from sending “snail mail”. I used to send out a little over a hundred cards. It would take me days to get them all ready to mail out. I sent them to friends, family, neighbors, old classmates, and pretty much anybody I thought needed to receive a smile and some love in the mail. 🙂 My list has gotten a lot shorter over the years because a lot of my loved ones have already gone on and the price of stamps has gotten ridiculous, but I’m not ready to give up that tradition just yet. 🙂
I am a newcomer & really wish I had found you sooner. My husband & I volunteered a year in Kentucky. We fell in love with the people & their lifestyle. We have been married for 57 years & have always lived a simpler style of life. I would be honored to have one of your books. We volunteered in Jackson County, near McKee. Thank you for sharing your life & family. Merry Christmas, to you & yours!
I get a little misty eyed thinking about Christmas cards and what they meant to my Mama. Of course I still have many Christmas cards and other cards from Mama even though I had never lived more than a mile or two away from her and Daddy. I’ll bet Granny will be overwhelmed with all the Christmas cards she will receive this year and in the coming years. She sure is a precious soul and she reminds me of my dear Mother. Please give her a big hug from me. I haven’t got my Christmas cards done yet but I’ll be sure to send one to her and to your dear family. I love you all. Merry Christmas and may God bless us all!
Congratulations on 200,000 subscribers. Well deserved. You and all of your family are so talented, entertaining, informative and best of all genuine. Here is to the next 100,00! Happy Holidays everyone
I also wanted to say, growing up, one of my favorite Christmas gifts each year was receiving a box of pretty stationary. I saved one sheet and envelope from each box through the years, and I still have all those sheets and envelopes as memories in an old stationary box with a lid that clasps shut. I think it’s time I hunt down some old fashioned stationary stores and start buying pretty sheets of paper again to send thoughts to friends on.
Donna. : )
I thought I was crazy for holding on to some stationary! Guess I’m not the only one. I literally was just thinking about this this very morning. I have a few sheets of patterned paper set away. They were a gift from my maternal grandfather. He passed away when I was 10 & I don’t have many memories of him. He was unable to give us many gifts while he was alive. He had 10 children & my grandma died young, leaving him to finish raising them all alone. He had soooo many grandkids that none of us knew him very well. He was also very poor. but he did try to give us each a little gift (I have a baby doll still from him) and one year it was this stationary. I can’t for the life of me bring myself to part with it. It is very hard to find nice paper in stores, but you can online.
My Mom still tapes the cards they receive on red ribbons she drapes on the two French door frames in the entry hall (one door way goes to the dining room, and on the opposite side of the room the other doorway goes to the living room), and all down the stair banister, which is also in the entry hall where you come in the front door. When I lived at home, and when I am there visiting now, I love to read who the cards are from. Getting Christmas cards is exciting, and you never outgrow that happy feeling of opening the envelopes and seeing the pretty cards inside. It’s a shame that emails have overtaken opening the mailbox outside. I love receiving letters, and had pen pals I exchanged actual letters with until I moved here to North Carolina, my friends and I then switched to the ease of texts and emails. As I read your post today, I thought one thing I would like to do this new year is start handwriting my friends a real letter they receive in the mail from me again. I don’t want to be part of the crowd walking away from the pleasantries that were so much a part of life pre – technology. I want to keep the cozy and comfortable traditions of yesteryear alive. Letter writing has become a fading art. I don’t want to see it become extinct. Thank you for this wonderful post, Tipper! Your Mom deserves all the mail she will be receiving!! Her heart will be full of joy for sure!
Donna. : )
Forgot to say also that I really appreciate the history you bring to subjects like giving the explanation of where the first Christmas cards appeared and the history you provide to show who wrote an old song. Thanks so much Tipper for all the work you do. God Bless!
Congratulations on the 2000 mark!!!!!
Like Granny, I always knew who the first Christmas card was from even before I looked at the post mark as it was always from a precious Aunt of mine that taught me how to crochet. She was a superstar when it came to crocheting just like Granny.
Granny’s sweater’s are works of art and I love the one she was wearing in your vlog and the Christmas colored one Corie was wearing when she was decorating her little pink tree in the Presley Girls vlog.
We addressed our Christmas card to just you on the envelope but it was meant for everyone in Wilson Holler Merry Christmas!
I don’t send cards anymore but do love getting them and setting them up on my buffet. My SIL saved all the cards my daughter sent her for years (always family picture cards) and recently she gave them all back in a pack tied with a ribbon for Christmas. It really was a special present since my daughter now has all the family pictures in one place and could easily see the growth and changes over the years.
Get ready to receive an Email, lady friend, cause I adore your sweet and wonderful mother although I only know her from your videos. She deserves a thousand cards in my opinion. Imagine my dismay at Christmas cards going mostly by the wayside. I’m a stringer and taper but I haven’t had enough cards to concern myself with for about 14 years… God bless you, everyone, especially during this season, but all year long as well. Merry Christmas to all!
After mommy passed away, my brother sorted boxes of cards and papers she had kept for years. He found several Christmas cards addressed to me and an older sister from my grandma, Mammy. They were used cards someone had sent her the previous year. When I display those cards every Christmas year, I have to wonder if she sent all of her 70 grandchildren a card or if she only gave them to the family members she was currently living with. Either way, they are a treasure and I’m glad mom saved them.
I hope granny gets a mailbox full of cards! And I hope they all have handwritten messages and family pictures enclosed like they used to.
I just finished bundling about 80 cards for today’s mail and we sent at least 400 by email. I hope Granny gets several thousand this year.
I retired from the Postal Service after working there for 38 years, and my husband retired from the Postal Service this year to, after working there for 39 years. My how the cards have died off over the years, so sad! Mail is measured in feet and inches, just like you might imagine, stick a ruler up there and see how many inches of letters are there. 30 years ago a carrier, might average, 6 feet to 8 feet of cards per day (there are an average of 220 cards in each foot) before I retired last year, my carriers didn’t average anywhere near that kind of volume per day, sadly! But for me, it has always been so fun planning which card I can find to match the Christmas stamps or which stamps might match my Christmas cards, to Christmas address labels being ordered in July to make sure I had plenty. Not to mention trying to get a family photo taken and printed so that I could tuck one in. And for the largest number of years, I also included a Christmas letter to let everyone know what our family was up to in the last year. Nowadays, I’m always on the look to find the most beautiful card representing Jesus and passing on information about salvation, hoping my story will lead someone to investigate Jesus for themselves.
The older generation were big on Christmas cards, and I recall Mom sat down to send hers each year. After she became bedbound, she still would receive cards from those who had stayed in touch all those years. Also, something I thought was so great is folks I had not seen in maybe 50 years would faithfully attend the funerals of both my mom and dad. That was a simple and good time, and I suppose many reasons why the tradition is not as popular as it once was. I may have brain fog, but seems I remember postage stamps being about 3 cents back in the “olden days.”
You know what was really sad??? When a relative “quit” sending cards & back in the day there was no way to find out what happened to them. My gramma & a cousin wrote to each other religiously; letters, Christmas cards, etc… for decades. One year, no Christmas card showed up & this made my gramma wonder. She started writing & getting no reply (we live in NY & the cousin was in Michigan). My gramma never heard from her again & even tried to look for a death certificate/obituary. Nothing. My gramma was deeply saddened about this, until she died. She would every once in a while mention it and say, “I wonder what ever happened to her. I wish I just knew.” The older generation was much better at keeping in contact with people, even though it took more work to do so.
Christmas cards are one of the beautiful parts of the Christmas season. It’s a way to stay in touch and let others know that you’re thinking about them, but like you said, people don’t send them out like they use to. The cost is getting expensive and so are the cards, even the cheap ones.
Watched your video last night on reaching 200,000 subscribers and wanted to tell you congratulations!!! We enjoy your channel with all that you share with us. I believe you will hit a million before you know it!